The Smallest Things
by Kent Rigel
Summary: Vague spoilers for Journey's End. White converse trainers and bananas... something was definitely very wrong and something might be very right.


**Disclaimer**: Doctor Who, its characters and concepts are property of the BBC, Russell T. Davies and their affiliates. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit sought or acquired.

**Summary**: White converse trainers and bananas... something was definitely very wrong and something might be very right.

**Genre**: General

**Characters**: Donna Noble

**Spoilers**: Set after Journey's End. Vague spoilers.

**Author's Note**: I thought I might put a little bit of a more comforting spin on Donna's misfortune. Review at your leisure.

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**The Smallest Things**

It was the smallest things at first, which caused Donna Noble the most alarm.

The things that she couldn't explain away.

Lots of big things in the world weren't what they looked like or weren't quite what they seemed. Everything was stories, 'cause none of it had happened to her. Wars, art, science, politics, outer space... all those things were so far away as to be meaningless to a Chiswick Temp who watched East Enders, read Who's Who and drank pina coladas at the pub with her latest co-workers. Stories about spaceships in the sky, metal men walking the streets, a killing Christmas star, poisonous alien cars, deadly 'Dar-leks' and a sky full of planets... clearly the ravings of mad people, attention seekers, fear mongers or fools.

Who could blame her for thinking that considering the people she'd heard all of it from?

Shireen got drunk on tequila every other night, Mel often told stories about her days experimenting with recreational drugs, Trisha was always getting celebrity names mixed up and forgetting her own birthday and Karen was always making things up for a laugh or a practical joke and Crissy was just a little bit, well... simple, never could keep a train of thought. Every one of them was running a little low on the wattage upstairs.

So it was that when other things happened, the tiniest things, that Donna truly began to wonder.

Converse trainers. What had she been thinking? She hated sneakers. She loved her flats and posh heals.

So why was there a pair of white converse sneakers on the table in front of her?

Impulse buying had been an on and off problem of hers for a long time. She'd found a wedding dress in the closet just recently and her mum and granddad hadn't been able to explain how it got there... she didn't remember buying it and much more worrying was that it was clearly hers and it had been worn. But she supposed that could be explained, right? She'd been looking for a bloke more recently, aware that that was the sort of thing she should be getting around to... so she must have got it some how. She must have won it or found it, or maybe it was a joke from an old friend? Which didn't explain why she flinched every time she heard the name 'Lance' or why it made the image of that wedding dress pop into her mind like some sort of half remembered nightmare.

Then there was the trip to Egypt. She could remember it clearly. There'd been all the turbulence on the flight and the stressed out flight attendants. There was the shabby hotel and the imported food and the guide books and the tour bus. The pyramids had been magnificent until she'd seen them up close and realised that they had seen better days... days she didn't know about, stories and history from long ago, things she'd never bothered to learn and so she felt a little empty staring at the monuments and realising she wasn't qualified to appreciate them. The flight back home, the sand in her clothes and bags, the light sunburn on the back of her neck where she'd forgotten to put on the sunscreen and the rash she'd found on her forearm from that camel she'd patted...

What on Earth had possessed her to go? She hated having to leave her normal haunts, even just driving all the way across London to file paperwork or for a job interview. Why had she suddenly acquired a shoebox full of travel brochures under her bedside table and started watching documentaries about Thailand or Mongolia?

She'd found herself spending more and more time every day, sitting and thinking, trying to reconcile the glaring contradictions and the sure feeling that something was missing. The process always left her tired, so she stopped going out to the pub, stopped reading the magazines, and couldn't spare attention for Big Brother. Instead she found herself most nights on the hill with her granddad watching the sky, peering at fuzzy far away galaxies and distant dim stars or just staring off into space and every time she came back to herself, snapped out of a vacant trance, she'd be unable to remember what she had been thinking of.

She'd started reading a lot too and it had been strangely new and unusually comforting all at the same time, to look at a stretch of printed words and just absorb when she'd used to plough through or skim over them. Suddenly she _owned_ twelve Agatha Christie books and yesterday she'd sat for half an hour reading those tiny little stories in the newspaper about things happening overseas like some archaeological dig in Italy or some tribute to Ghandi. Really, Ghandi, what the hell was that supposed to mean to her?

She'd suddenly changed her tea preference. Milk and two sugars. Donna Noble hated milk in her tea, always had from the age of eleven when she'd started drinking it until... she wasn't sure when, it seemed like maybe yesterday, or just last week. Now she had four cups a day with milk, lots of milk. It wasn't the only change in her food preferences... there was the sudden urge to eat bananas. She'd never cared much for them before, in fact pears had been her favourite... and now she couldn't even look at a pear and she could only look at a banana long enough to peel it and eat it. Stranger yet, on some days she got the urge to run and run and run, on some days she'd look at the sky and see it on fire for the briefest moment and some days she had the strangest urge to take the toaster apart and look inside it.

She'd begun to think she'd gone mad... until one day last week.

Just as she left the shops on her way home from her new, posh job as a secretary at a research firm called The Mr. Copper Foundation, when suddenly she'd spotted a chip joint and had the urge to eat the last possible food she should be even thinking about. One did not eat greasy, fatty, salty, roughly cut potatoes when on a diet... not even these ones, these really great ones. And so she'd been sitting at a little plastic table on a little plastic chair eating hideously unhealthy and strangely comforting fried potato pieces when she'd heard screaming coming from an alley way. A deep terrible scream, full of terror, straight from the deepest place of a person who was in fear for their life.

She'd ran... towards it.

She'd run straight towards certain danger. In fact, she couldn't get there fast enough. The thought that she should be running the other way, away from the danger, that she had no business getting herself involved in someone else's business or that even if she found the source of the screams that she had no idea what she would find or what she would do about it... none of these had occurred to her until she found herself standing at the end of the alley watching a thief digging through a woman's handbag as he waved a switchblade knife at the terrified woman.

In a crystal clear moment of insight Donna had grabbed a handy metal rod and charged, screaming right along with the other woman. Her voice deep with a righteous anger she didn't know she had as she yelled all sorts of accusations, threats and filth at the startled mugger who'd dropped the handbag and run from the crazy lady wielding a corroded, metal pipe. In the moment that followed Donna stood staring at the handbag on the ground, where the robber had stood before he'd fled for his life... and she'd felt... right. She'd done the right thing. She'd gone to the rescue. She'd saved a stranger and she'd been brave, defiant and... and... suddenly the woman she'd rescued, _rescued!_, was hugging her, thanking her...

Bananas, white trainers, Earl Grey tea and milk, Ian Drury and cooked spuds. Heroic acts.

Now she was certain she was mad.

Maybe that would be okay.


End file.
